Citizens of Pakistan are awaiting the Election Commission of Pakistan’s (ECP) reaction to a request by Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN), a coalition of non-governmental and civil society organizations, to withhold election results in the national or provincial assembly constituencies where women in some polling areas were barred from voting.

FAFEN had also urged ECP to announce that any political party that barred women from voting in any electoral area will not have its candidates certified as winner from any national or provincial assembly constituency. It has been widely reported that mainstream religious and political parties such as PML-N, PPP, ANP, JUI-F, PTI and JI entered into such agreements in dozens of constituencies in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) wherein candidates from mostly religious parties won the elections and now are sitting in assembles, and some of them have already assumed ministerial responsibilities.

ECP should not expect that any political party that has lost the election will lodge a complaint because they are part of such unholy agreements. Now it’s for the ECP to call spade a spade. ECP has now received all the data from individual polling stations. It’s not a big task to segregate those stations wherein women voting ratio was nil.

Injustice with women in KPK and other conservative parts of the country is going on for decades; it is about time some one comes out and declares enough is enough. — Masood Khan, Jubail